The big Irishman was pulling burdened breaths and haste had flushed his
lean cheeks, and they faced each other for an instant in silence before
he caught her hands in a hard clutch. "I will be swift," he said, "the
way the courage won't be oozing out of me!"
"Yes, Michael Daragh!" She stood up straight and proud before him,
waiting for his word. She had waited long for it, turning her back alike
on prosperous, opulent love and busy and purposeful spinsterhood, knowing
that happiness for her was the grave, young saint whose chief concern
would be always for the world's woe. Richly dowered though she was in
body and brain, fit for a man's whole devotion, she would be content to
share him with the submerged, with the besmirched and befouled of the
earth. And at last he was speaking.
"Many's the bold boon I've begged, but never the like of this," he said,
his gray eyes holding hers, "but _never_ the like of this! Would
you--_could_ you--be dining with a dope fiend?"
It seemed a long time to Jane before she worked her hands free of his
clasp and heard her voice, "I--don't believe I understand----"
"Why would you, indeed?" he cried, penitently. "Let you sit down till I'm
telling you."
She seated herself in her straight desk chair, and--"Dining with a dope
fiend," she heard herself saying. "It sounds rather like a line from a
comic song, doesn't it?"
"A lad he is, just," said Daragh, earnestly. "It got hold of him after a
sickness in the smooth devil's way it has. Six months, now, I'm toiling
with him. Times I have him on his feet, times he's destroyed again. 'Twas
a terrible pity I had to be leaving him the while I was home in Ireland.
Well, I found him doing rare and fine, God love him, back at his drawing
again in the scrap of a studio I found for him, but a pitiful tangle of
nerves and fancies. What he needs now is a friend--his own sort--some one
that speaks his own tongue. He thinks the decent world will have none of
him,--a weak, pitiful thing isn't worth the saving. Fair perished with
the lonesomeness, he is. 'I used to know women,' he was telling me,
'pretty women, clever ones; I miss them--the sound of their voices and
the look of their white hands and their making tea, and the light, gay
talk we'd be having!' Then he sat, limp, with the grit gone out of him.
'Not one of them would come near me, now,' he said. 'Holding their skirts
away from me, passing by on the other side.' And then--may the devil fly
away with my tongue, Jane Vail--I heard myself saying, 'There's one won't
be doing that, lad! There's one, the best and fairest and cleverest of
them all, the wonder-worker of the world,' I said, 'will be putting on
her gayest gear and be coming here to make tea-talk with you, the way
you'll think the month of June itself is happened in your studio!'" He
stopped, looking down at her with anxious eyes.
Jane took her own time about looking at him, and when she did it was
almost as if she had never seen him before. He was still wearing his
winter suit, this soft spring weather, and it wanted pressing and his
boots were far from new. He stooped a little as he stood there, waiting
for her verdict, as if even the broadest shoulders wearied finally of
other people's loads, and the line of his zealot's jaw was sharper than
ever. She felt nothing but scorn for him. He had birth, breeding,
abilities; why must he wrap himself in monkish sackcloth, in monkish
celibacy? Rage rose in her, rage and ridicule for herself. So, this was
the man for whom she had dressed herself three times, cunningly and
provocatively? This was the man to whom she had come running with her
heart held out in her hands,--her sane, sound, hitherto unassailable
heart, twenty-eight years old,--when he required of her merely a service
such as he might ask of any of his Settlement workers,--money from this
one, work from that one, charm and cheer from her, Jane Vail.
Worry throve in his eyes. "I'm doubting I had the right to ask you. Is it
too much, indeed?"
Jane rose, lifting her shoulders ever so slightly. "The right? Why,
surely. You're asking me for an hour or so of my time just as you would
ask me for a check. I am to lift up the light of my countenance on this
young gentleman, then, and convince him that he is still socially
desirable?"
"I'll be praising you all the long days of my life if you will," he said
humbly, continuing to stand.
"Sit down, then, while I put on my hat," she said carelessly, quite as
she would have spoken to a messenger, and moved toward her bedroom door.
"Please"--he took one step after her--"it's riot but your little brown
gown would charm the birds off the bush,--and it's not that I'd be
mentioning it or asking it for myself, but----"
"No," said Jane, and her voice was as bright and dry as her eyes, "one
could hardly fancy you asking anything for yourself."
"I would not, indeed," he said, grateful for the exoneration, "but I'm
wondering ... wouldn't you seem grander to the lad in a--a gayer frock,
perhaps?"
"Very possibly I would," said Jane, reasonably. "But I shall have to keep
you waiting a little longer then." She went into the other room and shut
the door slowly and softly to demonstrate the perfect control of her
nerves, and proceeded to make her fourth toilet for the hour. She took
her time and did her best, which was very good indeed when she put her
mind to it, and she hummed a snatch of song all the while, just loud
enough to carry to the study, but every time she met her shamed and
furious eyes in the glass her face crisped into hotter flame and she
stopped singing.
She kept him waiting for twenty-five minutes, but his eyes silently
acquitted her of having wasted her time. They set off at once, Jane
agreeing pleasantly that it would be better to walk. Michael Daragh had
never seen her more alert and alive to the things about her. Nothing
escaped her darting glance,--the lyrical, first grass in the Square, the
stolid and patient tiredness of an Italian crone on a bench, the
pictorial quality of a hurdy-gurdy man, and yet, for all her chattiness,
the smart young person beside him seemed leagues upon leagues away from
him. He supposed, miserably, that she was aghast at him for this
preposterous demand upon her, but he was not penitent; he would have done
it again. His people's needs were to be met with anything he would buy,
borrow, or beg for them, and this radiant creature's beauty and light
were only given to her in trust, after all, to be dispensed and diffused.
"You've the step of a gypsy boy," he said presently, "for all the foolish
shoes you will be wearing. We're here now. 'Tis here he has his little
hole of a studio."
It was a decent enough place for working and living and Jane had no doubt
whatever that Daragh paid the rent. Their host was discovered bending
over a chafing dish which gave forth an arresting aroma. He was a sallow
youth with quick hands and too-bright eyes and he spoke in nervous jerks.
"How-do-you-do? How-do-you-do? Awfully good of you. Daragh says you are
interested in drawings--just look round, will you? I'll have this mess
ready in a minute. Daragh said he had to go up to town early, so we'll
have a combination supper tea." He flew to test the coffee, sputtering in
a percolator.
Jane, slipping out of her wrap, moved slowly and graciously about the
little room, well and pleasantly aware of Michael's anxious eyes upon
her. His wretched friend should have all the charm and cheer which he had
begged for him, but he himself should sit hungry at the feast. She picked
up a bold sketch in strong color and held it off with a very real
exclamation of interest. "This is _good_, Mr. Randal! This thing of the
old woman and pushcart! I like it a lot. And the bakeshop! It's good
stuff, all of it. What are you doing with it?"
"Nothing," said the young man, sullenly, his thin fingers beginning to
pluck at his face. "I've just started again. I've been ... ill. I suppose
Daragh's told you--about me?"
"Yes," said Jane, easily, "he's told me everything, I think, but what I'm
interested in now is--what are you going to do with this stuff?"
"I don't know," he said, slackly. "It depends on how I feel. Some
days"--his eyes shifted and fled before her gaze--"well, you know how it
is yourself with your own work,--when you're in the mood--when you have
an inspiration----"
"I don't know anything about that sort of piffle," said his guest,
severely. "It's my mood to beat my poet's piano four solid hours a day,
and I shouldn't know an inspiration if I met one in my mush bowl!"
He produced a nervous laugh. "Ah,--but you have your market! You're
_there_! There's the urge--the spur----"
She looked from the crisp and living lines of his pictures to his dead,
young flesh, to his fingers, locked together and straining, to keep them
from their telltale plucking. "Look here," she said, "why shouldn't we do
something together?"
"We--togeth--" he sat down limply on the end of his bed-couch, staring,
and she heard Michael's quickened breath behind her.
"Yes! Let's try a calendar of New York. I've always had one in the attic
of my mind. Twelve pictures, you know, with bits of verse, of
prose,--sketches like these of yours here. There are several which would
do just as they stand. This sort of thing, you know, but balanced--Grand
Street pushcarts and a group of girls going into Lucy-Gertrude's on Fifth
Avenue."
"I get you," he cried, jumping to his feet. "Colonel's lady and Judy
O'Grady----"
"But no propaganda!"
"No, no,--cut the Sob Sister stuff,--just the pattern of it all, the
mosaic----"
"Yes,--done objectively!"
"Right! Gad,--that sounds like a corking idea! When can we start? Have
you the text or--Good Lord--my eats!" He dashed to the noisy chafing-dish,
a faint color creeping up into the unpleasant whiteness of his skin.
"Everything's done! Where will you sit, Miss Vail? Give her this tray,
will you, Daragh--_and_ the napkin, man! Can she reach the sandwiches?
Oh, I'm forgetting my perfectly good salad! Well, how is it? I'm not
much of a cheffonier, but----"
"It's melt-in-the-mouth," said Miss Vail, warmly. "I'm going to have
twice of everything!" She drew him out; she led him on; she kept the
color in his face and his fingers quiet. By every pretty means in her
power she made it clear that she was having an uncommonly good time, that
he was distinctly her sort of person.
Michael Daragh sat back with deep wonder in his eyes. In all her
exquisite plumage she had alighted in this dull place, filling it with
freshness. And an onlooker would have gathered that the young artist and
the beautiful lady who wrote were the best of merry chums, the silent man
in the background a civilly tolerated outsider.
After a while something of this seemed to strike young Randal. "Look
here, Daragh, you haven't to start uptown yet! Why don't you contribute
something to the gayety of nations? Haven't you any parlor tricks?" Then
he caught up his own work and his grin faded. "Tricks ... yes, that's
what he can do, Miss Vail. Conjuring tricks. He can turn a skulking alley
rat into something faintly resembling a man--but"--his courage and
brightness fell from him like a masker's domino on the stroke of twelve
and the fingers rose to his face, picking and plucking--"he can't keep it
from turning back again."
"I can, indeed, lad," said the Irishman, stoutly.
"I don't know, Daragh ... I don't know." He leaned back on the couch,
spineless with nervous exhaustion, and Jane felt a sick distaste and
horror enveloping her.
"'Tis a true word, laddie," said Michael. "You don't know; none of us
know--and we don't have to know, praises be, beyond the next hour, beyond
the next step on the path." He rose and crossed slowly to the young man
and pushed him gently down until he was resting at full length on the
couch. "Easy, now! Let you lie there at your ease. Miss Vail knows how
you haven't the whole of your strength in you yet, and you painting and
drawing the day long!"
Young Randal muttered something brokenly and tried to rise, but the big
Irishman held him firmly. "Easy, I'm telling you!" The boy relaxed,
stretching out to his lank length, one arm crooked childishly over his
eyes, and Michael Daragh sat down beside him, his long legs folded under
him, on the floor. "'Tis the true word, surely," he said. "We don't know,
indeed. And--glory be--there's many the time that the thing you've braced
yourself so fine and strong to stand doesn't happen at all, and you never
have to stand it. That was the way of it with Maggie Kinsella at home,"
he said.
Jane, seeing his intention, stepped to the door and snapped off the
overhead light, and tilted the shade on the lamp until Randal's couch was
in shadow.
"I'm so ashamed ... with her here ..." it was a muffled whisper from
under the shrouding arm,--"so rotten weak...."
"This Maggie Kinsella makes the finest lace for miles about," said
Michael, unhearing, unheeding. "Rare tales she would be telling me and I
no higher than the sill of the window there, and I'd thought to find her
long dead and buried surely, the way she was always as old as the Abbey
itself. But no--there she was still in her bit of a cottage, the time I
was just home, the oldest old woman I ever saw out of a mummy's wrappings
and like a witch indeed with the poor, pockmarked face she has."
The figure on the couch was relaxing more and more now, and the Irishman
sank his voice to a purling murmur of brogue.
Jane found a low chair and propped her elbow on the arm of it and leaned
her cheek on her hand and closed her eyes. She did not want to look at
young Randal and she found that she could not look at Michael Daragh. She
was glad to be in a corner of the little room where the faint light of
the lamp did not penetrate; she wished it might have been complete
darkness to cover her. She was so unutterably tired ... never in her life
had she been so tired. And Michael Daragh, her best friend of four good
years, her--what should she say?--dream lover? Yes, that was sufficiently
cheap and sentimental and maudlin for the sort of thing she had indulged
in,--her dream lover for two blissful months, seemed as much of a
stranger to her now, as strange and as unpleasantly distasteful as the
young artist and dope fiend on the sagging bed-couch.
When the boy fell asleep, she would creep away, and _away_!